>> May 19, 2020
>> Blog Post #71
My contributions to this blog have been few and far between recently. I have both wasted a lot of time and yet, have also coincidentally been busy.
The waste of time I can attribute to probably switching tasks too often. You’ll get more done in three straight hours of one project than on one hour of three different projects. Spreading myself thin hasn’t helped and I have to accept that I can’t do all the nice to have things. Focus.
However, I am also cognizant of the fact that these periods generally come hand in hand, at least for me, with periods where I am actually doing a lot of background thinking – you could call it hesitating – on what the best course of action is.
I’ve always believed in luck. Not something that comes out of nowhere and hits you blindly, although that can happen, but something that happens for reasons that weren’t necessarily planned for, just because you had the right surface of “luck potential”. That is how I explained it to myself for years. You can probably do a few things in life that will just help you get lucky more frequently. That was my basic intuition and the little effort I made to explain the concept to myself.
Well yesterday I just started reading Taleb’s Black Swan. I am barely through the first chapter, but it just might be exactly what I needed. A more detailed and thoughtful search into how you can possibly set yourself up nicely for getting lucky.
I am in the free market for maximizing my odds of encountering luck.
How do I do that best, I will have to see. Until now my intuition was that the biggest factor was talking to people. It probably holds some solid statistical properties, but I’ll have to see if Nassim Taleb discusses that or not. I hope he does, as that is something that I would be extremely interested in reading about. If not, I’ll call that an oversight.
I think I’ve moved far enough with my project in a limited space, that is without making it to public and too visible, some sort of nurturing phase. Now it’s time to bring this puppy to town and see what good comes of it. It has a lot of potential. Let’s hope I don’t focus too narrowly and keep a wide “luck potential” surface.
I can’t recommend enough the two previous books from Nassim Taleb that I read : Antifragile & Skin in the Game. Both were superb reads, even though I must admit a strong preference to the first one. What really made an impression on me was how dull the books i read in between these two were in contrast.